Those who can’t handle my lows don’t deserve my highs
The whole life is a sinusoid between hypomania and subsyndromal depression. Periods of intense enthusiasm alternate with periods of intense despair. Ecclesiastes 3: ‘There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing’. This captures the sinusoid rhythm of human living really well. Unlike, say, Aristotle who argued we should aim for the golden mean between two extremes.
There’s no such thing as a stable mood. It’s either really bad, like life-shatteringly bad, or really great. And I don’t even have BPD. I’m normal. This is normal. *
I’m kind of a depressive person. I’m prone to depressions. But I’m also effective and prone to prolonged states of productivity and excitement. When things are going well, those productive states prevail, and the depressive phases occupy only a small fraction of time.
The problem is that episodes of enthusiasm and episodes of despair are not mutually intelligible. The mental and emotional states that define them are not transferable through ordinary means of communication such as words or rational arguments. One cannot truly relate to one state while they are in the other. Your depressive self or your enthusiastic self becomes a stranger to you. That is why it is nearly impossible to reason yourself out of depression. Rational methods belong to the cheerful self; they are its tools. To reach the depressive state, one needs to rely on other methods.
Which ones?
Based on my own empirical observations, I mostly get depressed when I feel misunderstood.
This is corroborated by research. Statistically, the feeling of being misunderstood is the top factor most strongly correlated with unhappiness and low life satisfaction.
Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38869872/
For instance, I feel horrible when I get the feeling that I’m a weirdo, that something’s wrong with me, that my life choices are wrong and my ideas bad.
When someone says they had to listen to their friends saying something’s off with her. When someone quits a project because they cannot stand my personality, culture, or politics (borderline autistic, properly Slavic, classically liberal). When I talk about the events of my week (organizing discussions of Leo Strauss? going to exhibitions of Czech Informel? watching Akira Kurosawa? etc) and all I receive in return is judgemental silence, with the unspoken question hanging in the air: why cannot she be more normal?
The feeling of not being understood often leads to episodes of depression. Sometimes minor. Sometimes severe. When it accumulates from multiple sources at once, it can turn into full-blown, prolonged states of despair that may last weeks. When you get the feeling that you were born defective. That the main protagonist in the game of your life is not worth playing for.
In the last month, I conducted an experiment and monitored which events preceded the shift from a state of despair to a state of excitement.
Surprise: they were all linked to the feeling of being understood.
For instance, one time I was browsing Twitter when the account of Paul Skallas (aka the LindyMan) showed up. I had been following him for a long time, but it was the first time I actually checked his longer texts in the newsletter. They made me overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Skallas’ writing style is simple, but his ideas are quite unconventional (so in the age of LLMs it’s the ideas that matter, not the form!..). Many of the ideas resonated, and some of them even matched a few of my own drafts (see: moral lag; the culture of suits, etc). Despite the controversy of his theories, Skallas is relatively popular. After a horrible, emotionally tiring week, this was the random encounter that made me cheerful. So it turns out my ideas are not bad?
Another time, I randomly decided to check the website of the BFI Institute at London Southbank while procrastinating at work. Their program for the first quarter of 2026 was striking in its excellence – both classics and little-known films: Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts, Howard Hawks, Iranian New Wave. After that, I checked the program at the Barbican, another great British cultural center – the BBC Symphony Orchestra is playing Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird!.. The whole week before had been full of turbulent drama and a consequent self-doubt. The stuff from BFI and the Barbican was like a breath of fresh air. So it turns out my tastes are not weird?
The feeling of being understood correlates with happiness. Not being understood correlates with unhappiness.
How to optimize for understanding?
I think there are two ways.
First, as it was in my case, through exposure to random things – environments with a high chance of discovering something new and exciting. In this increasingly fragmented world, it’s random findings and encounters on the Internet that may change your mood and your life (Nassim Taleb made a similar point about stock markets and networking events).
If someone, somewhere, across time and geography, perhaps across generations, someone long dead or someone not yet alive, gets you. It sounds like something very small, but it’s the most satisfying feeling in the world.
It has approximately the same therapeutic effect as listening to this song by Nirvana.
Which leads me to the next point.
Second, maintaining an accepting environment, a social circle that accepts you right here and right now – the importance of it cannot be overemphasized.
The right social circle is precious in terms of how much people can help pull you out of your lows. It’s equally crucial that they don’t exacerbate those lows. How? Through encouragement, support, endearment, and motivation. By validating your self-worth. By reminding that you’re great. That you’re seen. By doing everything that Maslow’s motivation for growth requires. A group of people who just gets you is really precious.
I’m saying accepting and supportive – but first of all understanding. Because support without understanding feels fake; it doesn’t feel satisfying or genuine. Support without understanding is instrumental and is aimed at being liked by another person, and when that goal is withdrawn, support for the cause ceases.
On the opposite side, if you want to fall into despair, surround yourself with people who don’t understand you. Every time I call my parents, I’m depressed for a few hours. They don’t share my interests, don’t understand my values, and cannot relate to me.
It’s a mistake to think that warriors don’t need a place to rest. Strength is only the visible part of the story. Home, the backstage, the rear – these are unseen, yet they are no less important. Home is for healing wounds. It’s Eurycleia washing the feet of Odysseus. King Arthur, cared for and healed on the island of Avalon. The last thing a warrior needs at home is another hostile environment. This is what killed Siegfried. The same applies to warriors of mental battles (think of Peter Abelard, who described himself as a knight of dialectic, armed not with swords but with arguments **). At home and among friends is where one doesn’t need to prove oneself yet again.
To understand and to be understood – these are the only end goals relevant in this life.
Choose well.
Notes:
* For many organic entities and dynamic systems, equilibrium is death. See dissipative strictures in physics that are maintained through the exchange of energy. For such structures, a state of normalcy requires volatility.
Regarding BPD, see Nassim Taleb: ‘Not only are we averse to stressors, and don’t understand them, but we are committing crimes against life, the living, science, and wisdom, for the sake of eliminating volatility and variation. I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence-perhaps even the first source.’
** ‘I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war.’